Can Problem Solving Be Problematized? Preparing Children for Security Through Performing and Enacting Human-in-Crisis

• In Event: 28.022 - How the Sciences of Curriculum Became Reasonable: Their Emergence in Postwar Years and Its (Dis)Continuity

Abstract

The policy and scholarship on STEM education associate STEM as the unlimited force of unearthing the nature of Human and regard STEM people as the exemplary problem-solvers, decision-makers, and innovative learners who are the autonomous and responsible citizens defending the nation and the globe from known and unknown threats in a post-crisis era (e.g., NAS, NAE, and IM, 2007; NRC, 2012). This paper examines how the epistemological principles that order problem-solving in STEM classrooms were historically produced through practices that normalized crisis sensitivity and rendered human mind-body actionable for security. By historically, I do not mean to trace how previous practices of problem-solving in science and mathematics education evolved to become what they are today. Rather, I focus on two sets of historical practices that performed and enacted human-in-crisis to engineer human nature and responsibilize individuals to prepare themselves for crisis control. First is the STEMic simulation of human-in-crisis that was conducted by American behavioral scientists during and after WWII to know and control fear, panic, and irrationality efficiently (Erickson et al, 2013; Heyck, 2015; Orr, 2006). Second is the anticipatory thinking that was invoked by increasing development of information technology and taken up by groups of international and interdisciplinary educators and scholars to innovate learning, curriculum, and research aiming to develop “human potential” for human survival around the 1980s (Peccei, 1977; Botkin et al., 1979; Shane and Tabler, 1981).

The second part of the paper reveals how the creation of “situations” of conflict and crisis, the search for the boundaries of human rationality, and the responsibilization of the human subject as a risk-taker and crisis-controller in the Cold War era are re-assembled in today’s pedagogical discourse of problem-solving (NGSS, 2013; Ambitious Science Teaching, 2018). Curriculum planners are asked to continually collect “contexts” (which engender problems and uncertainty) for students to learn to overcome shame and fear when confronting unknown situations to use what they have to solve various problems, which is taken as a proof of their autonomy and responsibility. STEM classroom is supposed to provide a learning environment that simulates and anticipates all sorts of possible situations to develop students’ high cognitive order to adapt and survive the unknown future. This “innovative” effort does not challenge the status quo as it intended but reinscribed it by objectivizing the potentialities of human body-minds as the infinite resources that could be developed and controlled through educational science to actualize the “events” without “surprise.” By preempting and preparing for shock, shame, and fear, the moment of crisis was normalized as the constancy of change through its iterative performance. Students and teachers are turned into civil warriors who are prepared through schooling for a total war on crisis. The present becomes a space where children, teachers, and schools can transform themselves to be less vulnerable and fearful when confronting the risks, crises, and threats that are thought to be imposed by the politico-cultural other.

Author

• Lei Zheng, University of Wisconsin - Madison